New Year
Well, I am starting my third year as Web Design teacher here at Seymour High School. I have come to the point where I really need to figure out what I am doing.
I am exploring using the ning system this year and moving away from blogmeister. I am trying to get this set-up. Blogmeister worked great for us but you can upload video and music much easier on the ning. I will need help on monitoring student work. Blogmeister was easy because it came right to my email.
Getting this working in our system is a challenge. We are told to try new things and to use the newest technology but I get so much push back.
My push this year is to insist on collaboration and I want to find a way to track this data. I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on what collaboration is. How do you measure it? If students “work together” did they actually “collaborate”? Plenty of thinking to do….
September 11th, 2008 at 7:08 am
One of my personal heroes, Randy Pausch, was a college professor of virtual reality and computers and he set up a very highly succesful program in his classes to get his students learning, more importantly collaborating, and most important of all excited and interested in what they were learning. To achieve this he created a program where students with all different backgrounds would work together to create a virtual world. He opened up their construction of these worlds to whatever their imaginations spit out inside their groups. After a couple weeks he would look back at what the students had created in their groups and then grade them upon what they have made, and also allow for students to grade each other. The students were allowed to grade how each other performed and how they worked with the other members of their groups. Then after the grading was done randy would look back and tell the class, what you have accomplished here is pretty awesome but I know you can do better. Then He would reorganize the students into all new groups and tell them to do it again. Randy Pausch’s page The course, Building Virtual worlds
September 11th, 2008 at 7:12 am
And one other thing
Can students talk to other students and thusly share and collaborate ideas over synchroneyes?
If we can then perhaps this is a way for collaboration to take place and for you to monitor the collaboration so that thusly you can ensure the topic of conversation doesn’t leave the class, and we can fully collaborate with fellow students. A program should always be used to its maximum capabilities. I know for example that I would have liked to put out a message on a general chat board of all the collective students asking if anyone needs my held with their work today after I finished…
September 11th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Ryan:
We do use the chat function at times. At the moment I am trying to have students use the blog function to make comments on work. We will use multiple platforms as the class develops.